Love at First Sight - By B. J. Daniels Page 0,68
knew he’d betrayed her love. Betrayed her.
She reached the lodge, hurriedly locking the door behind her. The cell phone wasn’t on the coffee table where Jack had left it that morning. Where she had just seen it minutes ago. She glanced around the lodge, trying to remember if she’d moved it. Her head was reeling. The phone had been on the coffee table.
“Are you looking for this?” a voice asked behind her.
JACK RACED THE JEEP up the mountain but hadn’t gone far when he came around a bend and saw a car blocking the road. He stared, his headlights slicing through the rain that now fell hard and fast.
Denny’s car?
Jack couldn’t believe what he was seeing. What was Denny doing here? Why would he check himself out of the hospital to come up here? Especially in his condition and knowing Jack wouldn’t be here?
Jack stopped behind the car, his headlights cutting through the empty interior of the car. Fear clutched at him, colder than the rain hammering the Jeep’s roof. How had Denny found the ski lodge? If Baxter had figured it out, then Jack supposed anyone determined enough could.
Including the killer.
He tried the cell phone again, praying that Karen would answer. At least she wasn’t alone. He’d left his cousin Howard with her. The line rang and rang.
He got out of the Jeep and walked toward Denny’s car, wondering why he’d stopped in the middle of the road. To block it for anyone else coming up behind him?
Just as Jack suspected, there were no keys in the car, nor was he able to push it out of the way.
Where was Denny? What could have made him leave the hospital in his shape to drive all the way out here?
Jack knew he’d have to go the rest of the way on foot. But so would anyone behind him. He took off at a run up the steep mountainside, following the winding road, fighting back the fear and panic that he’d reach the lodge too late.
KAREN STARED at her mother’s bridge-club member and the gun in the woman’s hand, wondering crazily what her mother would have to say about this. “Annette?”
Annette Westbrook was small, with blue eyes, blond hair and the slight figure of a mere girl. It seemed so odd to see Annette with a gun. The other times, Annette had cards or a wineglass in her manicured hand. The gun looked completely out of place.
The cell phone in the woman’s other hand finally quit ringing. Had it been Jack calling to check on Karen? Annette acted as if she hadn’t even heard it. She seemed a little dazed.
“You know, don’t you?” Annette said after the heavy silence filled the lodge again. “You remembered everything, didn’t you?”
Annette had known about her memory loss? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said edging back toward the fireplace—and the poker, telling herself this wasn’t happening. None of this was happening. Let it all be a bad dream. Especially the part about Jack not being her husband.
It was the pistol Annette held that convinced Karen this wasn’t a dream and kept her from even considering trying to overpower the woman. “What’s going on?”
“I need you to tell me something,” Annette said, her voice deceptively soft, gentle. With her free hand she reached into her purse.
Karen couldn’t have guessed what the woman would pull out even if she’d been given clues.
Annette withdrew a silver frame and offered it to her the way she might have an appetizer.
Karen stopped inching her way toward the fireplace to take the nicely framed photograph. As she glanced down at it, she was surprised to see that it was of Annette, a man she’d never seen before and a beautiful young girl who looked familiar and another man. It was that man, the one on the far right, who grabbed Karen’s attention.
“You recognize him, don’t you?” Annette asked with a strange politeness, considering she was holding a weapon on her. “He’s the man you saw with Liz Jones, isn’t he?”
Karen looked up, knowing her surprised expression had given her away. “Who is he?”
“My brother, Detective Captain Brad Baxter.”
Karen couldn’t hide her shock. Jack’s boss. The man she’d seen in the Hotel Carlton hallway with Liz was Jack’s boss? No wonder he’d been in the hotel ballroom that next morning. He’d returned to the scene of the crime all right—returned to pretend to investigate it.
She stared down at Brad Baxter’s photo and realized what it was about him that